The Bedroom
They did not escape another dose of Mrs. Davis, who appeared soon
afterward to announce that the big room upstairs was ready for them,
and would they step up and mind their heads please, the stairs were
that low. It was indeed a rambling sort of house, on three or four
different levels, as country inns are wont to be; it did not seem
possible to reach any one room from any other without going down and
up again or up and down again. At the head of the stairs Mrs. Davis
turned dramatically and pointed to a door marked “5”. “In there!” she
said, the complicated emotion in her voice plainly indicating what was
in there. To her obvious confusion the door opened as she spoke, and a
little, dark man, whom they guessed then and knew afterward to be the
secretary, came out into the passage. He was followed by a
policeman—no ingenuity could have doubted the fact—in plain clothes.
Bredon’s investigations were ordinarily made independently of, and for
the most part unknown to, the official champions of justice. But on
this occasion Fate had played into his hands. “By Gad!” he cried,
“it’s Leyland!”
It was, and I will not weary the reader by detailing the exclamations
of surprise, the questionings, the reminiscences, the explanations
which followed. Leyland had been an officer in the same battalion with
Bredon for more than two years of the war. It was at a time when the
authorities had perceived that there were not enough well-dressed
young men in England to go round, and a Police Inspector who had
already made a name for efficiency easily obtained commissioned rank;
with equal ease he returned to the position of an Inspector when
demobilized. Their memories of old comradeship promised to be so
exhaustive and, to the lay mind, so exhausting, that Brinkman had gone
downstairs and Angela Bredon to their room long before it was over;
nay, Mrs. Davis herself, outtalked for once, retired to her kitchen.
“Well, this is Al,” said Leyland at last. “Sure to be left down here
for a few days until I can clear things up a bit. And if you’re
working on the same lay, there’s no reason why we should quarrel.
Though I don’t quite see what your people sent you down for to start
with.”
“Well, the man was very heavily insured, you know; and, for one reason
or another, the company is inclined to suspect suicide. Of course if
it’s suicide it doesn’t pay up.”
“Well, you’d better lie low about it and stay on for a few days. Good
for you and Mrs. Bredon to get a bit of a holiday. But of course
suicide is right off the map.”
“People do commit suicide, don’t they, by leaving the gas on?”
“Yes, but they don’t get up and turn the gas off and then go back to
bed to die. They don’t open the window, and leave it open”——
“The gas turned off? The window opened? You don’t mean”——
“I mean that if it was suicide it was a very rum kind of suicide, and
if it was accident it was a very rum kind of accident. Mark you, I’m
saying that to you; but don’t you go putting it about the place. Some
of these people in the inn may know more about it than they ought to.
Mum’s the word.”
“Yes, I can see that. Let’s see, who were there in the house? This
secretary fellow, and the old gentleman I saw down by the river, I
suppose, and Mrs. Davis and the barmaid and the Boots—that’s all I’ve
heard of up to now. That’s right, keep ’em all under suspicion. But I
wish you’d let me see the room; it seems to me there must be points of
interest about it.”
“Best see it now, I think. They’re going to fix up the corpse properly
to-night; so far they’ve left things more or less untouched. There’s
just light enough left to have a look round.”
The inn must at some time have known better days, for this room was
generously proportioned, and could clearly be used as a bed-sitting
room. But the wall-paper had seen long service; the decorations were
mean, the furniture shabby; it was not the sort of accommodation that
would attract a rich man from Pullford but for the reputation the
place had for fishing and, perhaps, the want of any rival
establishment. Chilthorpe, in spite of its possibilities of
water-power, had no electric light; but the inn, with one or two
neighbouring houses, was lighted by acetylene gas from a plant which
served the vicarage and the parish hall. These unpleasant fumes, still
hanging in the air after two days, were responsible, it seemed, for
the tragic loading of the bed which stood beside them.
To this last, Bredon paid little attention. He had no expert medical
knowledge, and the cause of death was unquestioned; both the local man
and a doctor whom the police had called in were positive that the
symptoms were those of gas poisoning and that no other symptoms were
present; that there were no marks of violence, no indications even of
a struggle; the man had died, it seemed, in his sleep as if from an
overdose of anæsthetic. Beside his bed stood a glass slightly
encrusted with some whitish mixture; Bredon turned toward Leyland with
an inquiring look as his eye met it.
“No good,” said Leyland. “We had it analysed, and it’s quite a mild
sort of sleeping draught. He sometimes took them, it seems, because he
slept badly, especially in a strange bed. But there’s no vice in the
thing; it wouldn’t kill a man however heavily he doped himself with
it, the doctor says.”
“Of course it explains why he slept so soundly and didn’t notice the
gas leaking.”
“It does that; and, if it comes to that, it sets me wondering a
little. I mean, supposing it was murder, it looks as if it was done by
somebody who knew Mottram’s habits.”
“If it was murder, yes. But if it _was_ suicide, it’s easy to
understand the man doping himself, so that he should die off more
painlessly. The only thing it doesn’t look like is accident, because
it would be rather a coincidence that he should happen to be laid out
by a sleeping draught just on the very night when the gas was left on.
I’d like to have a look at this gas.”
There was a bracket on the wall, not far from the door, which
originally had been the only light in the room. But for bed-sitting
room purposes a special fitting had been added to this giving a second
vent for the gas; and this new vent was connected by a long piece of
rubber tubing with a standard lamp that stood on the writing-table
near the window. There were thus three taps in all, and all of these
close together on the bracket. One opened the jet on the bracket
itself, one led to the rubber tubing and the standard lamp and the
third was the oldest and closest to the wall, serving to cut off the
supply of gas from both passages at once. This third main tap was
turned off now; of the other two, the one on the bracket was closed,
the one which led to the standard lamp stood open.
“Is this how the taps were when the body was first found?” asked
Bredon.
“Exactly. Of course we’ve turned them on and off since to make certain
that the jets were both in working order. They were, both of them. And
we tried the taps for finger-prints—with powder, you know.”
“Any results?”
“Only on the main tap. We could just trace where it had been turned
on, with the thumb pressing on the right-hand side. But there were no
marks of fingers turning it off.”
“That’s damned queer.”
“Gloves?”
“Oh, of course you think it was murder. Still, if it was murder it
should have been the murderer who turned it on _and_ off. Why did he
conceal his traces in one case and not in the other?”
“Well, as a matter of fact, it was Mottram who turned the gas on. At
the main, that is. The tap of the standard seems to have been on all
the time, at least there were no marks on it. That’s queer too.”
“Yes, if he wanted it to be known that he committed suicide. But if he
didn’t, you see, the whole business may have been bluff.”
“I see, you want it to be suicide masquerading as accident. I want it
to be murder masquerading as suicide. Your difficulty, it seems to me,
is explaining how the tap came to be turned off.”
“And yours?”
“I won’t conceal it. The door was locked, with the key on the inside.”
“How did anybody get in, then, to find the corpus?”
“Broke down the door. It was rotten, like everything else in this
house, and the hinges pulled the screws out. You can see, there, where
we’ve put fresh screws in since.”
“Door locked on the inside. And the window?” Bredon crossed to the
other side of the room. “Barred, eh?” It was an old-fashioned lattice
window with iron bars on the inside to protect it from unauthorized
approach. The window itself opened outward, its movement free until it
reached an angle of forty-five degrees; at that point it passed over a
spring catch which made it fast. It was so made fast now that Bredon
examined it.
“This too?” he asked. “Was the window just like this?”
“Just like that. Wide open, so that it’s hard to see why the gas
didn’t blow out of doors almost as soon as it escaped; and there was a
high wind on Monday night, Pulteney tells me. And yet, with those
bars, it seems impossible that any one should have come in through
it.”
“I think you’re going to have difficulties over your murder theory.”
“So are you, Bredon, over your suicide theory. Look at that shirt over
there; the studs carefully put in overnight; and it’s a clean shirt,
mark you; the outside buttonholes haven’t been pierced. Do you mean to
tell me that a man who is going to commit suicide is going to let
himself in for all that tiresome process of putting studs in before he
goes to bed?”
“And do you mean to tell me that a man goes out fishing in a boiled
shirt?”
“Yes, if he’s a successful manufacturer. The idea that one wears
special clothes when one is going to take exercise is an upper-class
theory. I tell you, I’ve seen a farmer getting in the hay in a dickey,
merely to show that he was a farmer, not a farm labourer.”
“Well, grant the point; why shouldn’t a man who wants to commit
suicide put studs in his shirt to make it look as if it wasn’t
suicide? Remember, it was a matter of half a million to his heirs. Is
that too heavy a price for the bother of it?”
“I see you’re convinced; it’s no good arguing with you. Otherwise, I’d
have pointed out that he wound up his watch.”
“One does. To a man of methodical habit it’s an effort to leave a
watch unwound. Was he a smoker?”
“Brinkman says not. And there are no signs of it anywhere.”
“The law ought to compel people to smoke. In bed, especially—we should
have got some very nice indications of what he was really up to if he
had smoked in bed. But I see he wasn’t a bedroom smoker in any case;
here’s a solitary match which has only been used to light the gas—he
hasn’t burnt a quarter of an inch of it.”
“That match worries me too. There’s a box on the mantelpiece, but
those are ordinary safeties. This is a smaller kind altogether, and I
can’t find any of them in his pockets.”
“The maid might have been in before him and lighted the gas.”
“They never do. At least, Mrs. Davis says they never do.”
“It was dark when he went to bed?”
“About ten o’clock, Brinkman says. You would be able to see your way
then, but not much more. And he must have lit the gas, to put the
studs in his shirt—besides, he’s left some writing, which was probably
done late that night, though we can’t prove it.”
“Writing! Anything important?”
“Only a letter to some local rag at Pullford. Here it is, if you want
to read it.” And Leyland handed Bredon a letter from the blotting-pad
on the table. It ran:
To the Editor of the _Pullford Examiner_:
Dear Sir:
Your correspondent, “Brutus,” in complaining of the closing of the
Mottram Recreation Grounds at the hour of seven P.M., describes
these grounds as having been “presented to the town with money wrung
from the pockets of the poor.” Now, Sir, I have nothing to do with
the action of the Town Council in opening the Recreation Grounds or
closing same. I write only as a private citizen who has done my best
to make life amenable for the citizens of Pullford, to know why my
name should be dragged into this controversy, and in the very
injurious terms he has done. Such recreation grounds were presented
by me twelve years ago to the townspeople of Pullford, not as
“blood-money” at all, but because I wanted them, and especially the
kiddies, to get a breath of God’s open air now and again. If
“Brutus” will be kind enough to supply chapter and verse, showing
where or how operatives in my pay have received less pay than what
they ought to have done——
At this point the letter closed abruptly.
“He wasn’t very handy with his pen,” observed Bredon. “I suppose
friend Brinkman would have had to get onto this in the morning and put
it into English. Yes, I know what you’re going to say: if the man had
foreseen his end he either wouldn’t have taken the trouble to start
the letter or else he’d have taken the trouble to finish it. But I
tell you, I don’t like this letter—I say, we must be getting down to
dinner; attract suspicion, what, if we’re found nosing round up here
too long? All right, Leyland, I won’t spoil your sport. What about
having a fiver on it—suicide or murder?”
“I don’t mind if I do. What about telling one another how we get on?”
“Let’s be quite free about that. But each side shall keep notes of the
case from day to day, putting down his suspicions and his reasons for
them, and we’ll compare notes afterward. Ah, is that Mrs. Davis? All
right, we’re just coming.”